


key to life

by greyve



Category: Annihilation (2018 Garland), The Southern Reach Trilogy - Jeff Vandermeer
Genre: + weird interpretation of existing biological systems to bizzare forms, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bad Ending, Body Horror, Existential Angst, Gen, Gore, Mutation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-07
Updated: 2018-05-07
Packaged: 2019-05-03 12:31:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14569074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greyve/pseuds/greyve
Summary: The Biologist assumes her new role: All, and also nothing.





	key to life

**Author's Note:**

> weird amalgam ficlet of the books and film, sorry buds

 

 

Nobody was themselves anymore.

There are moments where she was more of _herself_ than others. If still had the capacity for humor, she would find it a little funny: the idea of self after all this ( what she _will be_ , _is_ , _was_ ). The only immutable part of her original form was really mostly just the hive-like swarm of carbon bouncing off lesser ions, and she has neither the expertise, the equipment nor omnipotence to know if the protons themselves have been ripped apart and blindly shook like a raffle bag. 

For all this place has changed them, it could be the case. This case being of energy, morphing by invisible rules newly introduced, mimicking the patterns of carbon organics -- or not. She doesn't know, not even when she spreads her fingers and there are five to each, an opposable thumb. Even in those moments, when she was more of  _herself_ than others. Even when she was another, skin deeper or more wrinkled, scarred, thick, haired in human entirety. Or close, in non-human entirety.

She was others. She is the others.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Faith had never appealed to her sensibilities, and in that sense there was tragedy there; she was unable to escape the crawling, unending, ever-closer fear of her own mortality. She wasn't afraid of dying, per se, because in the span of time a single life is a blink and a death is even less. She feared the cessation of her senses and her consciousness. That she was privileged enough to have the near-miraculous chance to experience the world and to have it taken away -- frightened here. She "got" why people had faith. She wished she had the same, just to alleviate the terror she felt some nights.

That wasn't a problem anymore. Consciousness -- the cessation of existence. That was no longer the case. Even the fear of the loss of human cognition, if it really mattered: wasn't.

She considered all other creatures without that consciousness, once upon a time. She doesn't _remember_ , per se, but she _knew_ that she's been incorporated into the other kingdoms. Even as a part of a prokaryotic lifeform she still had the ability to react to her environment, to move and reach however blindly towards resources as she would as a human being. Even as an ever-flowering shrub, cell walls and rigid roots and all, she reaches towards light and water. 

She doesn't miss consciousness. She's just differently conscious, now.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Fitness to reproduce is no longer an evolutionary pressure in the shimmering Area X. No, not when genomic exchange happens by simply taking a breath or lying in the long reeds by the restless creek, free from the confines of plasmids or gametes. The longer a pattern exists, the more likely it is to repeat.

( A blessing, if she still had the sensibilities and shock she used to have. As sexual reproduction is no longer, well, productive -- there seemed to be confusion in the environment about what to with the tissue, organs, systems. Some early  _things_ of repeating patterns of gaping holes and mucous membranes, writhing and crawling in the unpleasantness of slick seeping fluids. Pink, mostly, like a mixture of fresh menses and foggy discharge among other things.

It was a phenomenon that rendered itself null, with those exposed creatures either being entirely nonviable in the first place or falling quickly to the microorganisms engineered by the same ecosystem. Shapeless infected carcasses on the beach. That pattern simply didn't have enough time and concurrent examples to perpetuate. )

 

 

* * *

 

 

As pre-existing organisms had lifetimes to live before the shimmer enveloped them entirely, it's no surprise that after all everything is still distinctly  _Earth-like_. Eukaryotes still require cardiovascular systems to survive, and while the components may be changed the overall functionality is conserved. It's not alien at all, unlike the pulsating seed which she had bonded herself to in the first place.

She is sleek and silver and invertebrate with brain that can reach out and grab and digest, dendrite-like processes stretching into local enzymatic centers for digestion. She is large and reptilian rumbling with a thousand eyes, her heart only a single chamber with its contents churning like a washing machine. She is flattened on the surface of an old wall, xylem drawing water from her rooted hooves into her fruiting antlers. 

Not alien, after at all.

 

 

* * *

 

 

" _Annihilation!_ " The Psychiatrist would scream at her. "Annihilation, annihilation, annihilation, annihilation --" _such that her voice went hoarse._ "Annihilation! Why don't you just _fucking_ \--"

No, she didn't eat a phosphorous grenade like The Medic ( _husband_ ) did. Neither did she claw out her eyes and take out her knife and gut herself clitoris-to-sternum, like The Psychologist wanted her to do. In the end, they were both consumed as equals. Not as a clever puppeteer pulling the strings of a hapless marionette, but as two women ceasing to exist in their current form. As did the men of the prior expeditions. As did the locals, the lighthouse keeper crawling up-and-down a downward cave in an emulation of a prior life writing something akin to scripture in layered phospholipids on the walls.

As did her other fellows: the many words of The Anthropologist ( linguist? ), vibrating in the axons and vocal cords of the creatures that could sustain it. Ragged screams, maybe, but also etymology and vowels, the adoration for her baby sister.

As did her other fellows: The Surveyor ( or was she a paramedic? ), the keratin of twisted teeth and horns just eating, and eating, and eating. The hard corded muscle of the venus fly trap, several feet tall and bubbling phosphoric acid between its green jaws littered with a thousand dead insects and small mammal-likes. Looking at her five-fingered palms, almost forgetting what went wrong.

As did her other fellows: The Physicist, a willow weeping with tears from its ducts at the junctions where the branches split. An entire swarm of dragonflies with two pupils, eight legs and a stinger each. If beauty were still a  _thing_ \--

Yeah, no more sense of self: They were all split, reflected and refracted. Loci of one next to another. Polymorphisms, mixed ( has the configuration or count of unique nucleobases and amino acids fundamentally changed? ). Appliances plucked from a junkyard, chopped and sliced and melted to be incorporated to a thousand new ones in tiny pieces.

Really the opposite of the person and/or  _thing_ that makes Expedition 13, a thousand into one. She calls herself Ghost Bird because The Medic ( _husband_ ) called her that, once upon a time for her absence and disinterest, and she knows she isn't the original. She would be nearly flattered if she could be. Instead she's flattened, under her mimic's industrious boots, and shot by her mimic's assault rifle in a near-comedic twist, and blinked away from her mimic's eyes. 

The Mimic believes strongly in the self, despite her basis as a biological being of infinitely divisible parts ( only so much of them from Earth ). The mimic thinks she's a person, still, after all this time. The mimic scrapes pieces of her off walls and the splattered open ribcages and skulls of what she leaves behind, and for this excursion she departs safe and sound, leaving behind the rodent-like creature that used to be her ( their ) superior to forage through the fuzzy possum-posies.

She will be back, and she will never change. The Mimic which walks as The Medic would never change. They are immutable, a carbon copy made from the seed that infected the aperture of the lighthouse.

If she could, she'd be glad she gave it all away.

 

 

* * *

 

 

If she could, she'd be glad that she settled herself deep in those lungs to be exhaled, to be given away.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The world, in unity, perpetually shimmering and morphing. 

New rules of life, finally.

Convergence.

 

 


End file.
